Blueprints of the Afterlife

greatest musicians living on each continent at that time.”

“The Africa album was pretty incredible.”

“It was, wasn’t it? Africa had a lot of momentum coming off the Glamorous Life album. South America was solid too—”

“That album was way underrated.”

“By who? I want names! We were able to work with such a killer crew on Europe but there were all these distractions. Sound engineers ODing and shit. We thought Asia would be better but then the trade embargo and the Chinese cloning crisis and everything went to shit. It was about the right time to record Oceana. Basically an EP. Hardly anyone bought it. So we brought it all home and recorded the North America double album, which was supposed to be the comeback, the biggie. Oh well.”

“I thought Antarctica was pretty good.”

“True, that marine biologist played a mean harmonica.”

The appetizers arrived. Abby tried to repress her disgust as Kylee’s powdery lips curled around raw fish, her mouth a graveyard of teeth the color of coffee with two creamers. The woman made little moaning noises as she ate, as if discovering sashimi for the first time.

Kylee said, “Eventually I sobered up, bought this place from Isaac, and started thinking hard about what I had gone through in twenty years. I had fucked some of the most beautiful men on the planet. I had received the love of people who just wanted to touch me, eat my used Kleenex. The paparazzi were never really the source of my problems. They were just the in-between step. I was on one side of them, and on the other were exhausted shoppers in grocery store checkout lines. Ugly housewives and mouth-breathing teenagers. Week after week they’d see me while standing in line to buy their disgusting microwave food. I was beautiful. They wanted to be like me. And the reason they wanted to be like me was that they didn’t love themselves. They wanted to be someone like me who never shopped for groceries. And when designer drugs and nipple slips and Twitter rants and passing out at Cannes started to do me in, I began to remind them of who they really were and they started to hate me. Because it was easier to hate me, to ridicule my ‘bizarre behaviour,’ than to look into themselves and realize that they really were a bunch of fucked-up ugly bitches.

“When things got really out of control, when I started throwing goblets through plate-glass windows, Isaac himself showed up. He wasn’t much more than a teenager, seemed to me. A lumpy dork who could have afforded more fashionable glasses, but for whatever reason chose not to spend a smidgen of his billion-dollar fortune on designer eyewear. Go figure. Stinky hair stuck to his forehead, fidgety, would sort of hop up and down in his chair when he got excited about something. He wore T-shirts with pictures of dragons on them under his sport coats. I think he spent fifteen hours a day in front of his computers, five hours of that masturbating. Of course I seduced him. In a way I did it to punish myself for going so off the map. I’d fucked Jude Law. I’d fucked George Clooney. I’d been the guest of honor at numerous exclusive orgies. Now I was fucking this nerd with his shriveled little prick. I was doing it because I hated myself as much as those women standing in line at the grocery stores hated themselves.

“But then something really fucked-up happened. I started to fall in love with him. He showed me such tenderness. I was like an onion, with all these, like, layers of celebrity and shit. He peeled them back and found the girl within, and when he loved that child I gave myself to him completely. Suddenly I was back on the world stage. I was by his side at the Golden Globes. I completely reinvented myself. I rebuilt everything from the ground up. I made carefully crafted, self-deprecating comments about myself in the press. A new generation discovered my work and it started getting played at clubs. The fags embraced me anew. And best of all, we went on a shopping spree. We bought all those media companies that owned the tabloids that had dragged me through so much mud, and I personally visited their offices, one by one, and fired the editors and photographers who had so busted my balls. I decided to get smart. I’d never gone to college, remember. So we hired a private staff of professors to live here and instruct me in art history, philosophy, literature. I started working out again, five hours a day. I was a machine manufacturing my own self-actualization. Around this time we decided to turn the estate into an artists’ colony. We invited sculptors, composers, playwrights, poets, and painters to spend time here creating their work. We hosted dinners for Pulitzer winners and Nobel laureates. We held fund-raising retreats and charity balls. Oh, it was such a marvelous time!”

Kylee paused, seeming to revisit the era in the privacy of her thoughts. Abby let the silence last as long as Kylee needed. Outside, the sun settled into its horizon. After a time, Kylee began renegotiating with her meal and continued. “Of course, when you’re in those years you don’t expect the world to take a turn for the worse, do you? You expect the world to ride along on your own happiness, as if you had any control. But the Age of Fucked Up Shit reminded us that we’re just parasites on this planet and, like parasites, we can be easily exterminated. We were lucky. We kept to ourselves on this island, Isaac, Federico, and me. Once all the artists had gone we spent days in the parlour playing Barbie’s Shopping Mall Adventure. In those years it was best if you lived on an island, away from major population centers. The horror of it still makes me tremble. And it was during this time that my sweet Isaac, oh…”

Kylee began to cry, her leathery lips quivering into the shape of an hourglass tipped on its side. The waiter Federico brought a box of tissues. Kylee dabbed one beneath her glasses, pulling away gobs of teary mascara. Abby touched the woman’s hand. Kylee grabbed her wrist and dug acrylic fingernails into the soft flesh. She leaned closer and hissed, “He was murdered. I’m convinced of it. They said it was a heart attack brought on by too much Red Bull and Mountain Dew but I know it was murder! My poor sweet Isaac!”

“I had no idea,” Abby said. “Who did it?”

“We don’t know!” Kylee cried. “A hundred and fifty-five years I’ve stuck around and still we don’t know who did it! Why do you think I’ve kept this body alive? Why do you think I’ve cloned Federico hundreds of times? I need protection. I need someone to take care of me while I find out who killed my husband!”

The waiter Federico leaned over the table, clearing their plates. “Did you guys save any room for dessert?”

“I’ll have the triple chocolate decadence,” Kylee said. “Give our guest the rhubarb pie a la mode.”

Abby said, “So the police were never able to—”

“Police? You think there were freaking police involved? During the Age of Fucked Up Shit? You are young, young thing. The authorities fried bigger fish. Oh, I don’t know. Solve a homicide or deal with widespread rioting and looting. No, it was entirely up to us. We read up on forensic science, watched a lot of police procedurals. But we kept coming up cold. We combed the archives as best we could for clues as to who might have a motive for killing my husband. We barely made a dent in all those files. Then a burst pipe, oh hell. Now you, young thing, supposedly you are the one who is supposed to help us get to the bottom of this abomination. Why Mr. Kirkpatrick thinks you’ll be of any help is beyond me. You might as well hop on that boat and head back to wherever you came from. Everything worth knowing about this rotten place disappeared a long time ago.”

An almost-full moon hung close to the water and a feathery breeze skittered across the waves. Abby’s dreams were chopped-up pieces of grade school, trees, beaches, pink fur. She woke around three in the morning convinced she was being watched. Keeping her eyes closed, she reached across the bed for Rocco then remembered she wasn’t in Vancouver. She opened her eyes. The ghost hovered just beyond the window, bobbing a bit, as one would imagine ghosts to do. His form consisted of roiling wisps of translucence in the shape of a man. He appeared balding, with a bad comb-over, and he wore a T-shirt with the barely legible logo for a Comi-Con convention from over a century ago. He rubbed his eyes beneath spectral bifocals.

“Say something,” Abby said.

“Oh, sorry. Yeah, so, I guess you’re here to solve my ‘murder.’”

“Isaac Pope?”

“So they say.”

“Who killed you?”

“I actually buy the Red Bull and Mountain Dew theory, myself. You’re kind of hot, you know that? What do you say about flashing me a boob?”

“No thanks. What do you know about the archives?”

“You waste no time,” the ghost of Isaac Pope said. “What is it about the archives you want to know?”